Blasted Charger on the Beach: What to do when you over expose.

I was hoping to make a photo of one of Amtrak’s new Siemens Charger locomotives working the Pacific Surfliner.

I typically set my FujiFilm XT1 digital camera manually.

Most of the time this works well, as I gauge my exposures using the in-camera histogram. However, I’d become distracted immediately before the train arrived in the scene, and I grossly over exposed my sequence of photos.

Luckily, since I typically expose both RAW and JPG files I was able to work with the overexposed RAW image and correct for some of my exposure error using Lightroom.

Below are examples of the overexposed camera JPG and corrected RAW files, as well as a screen shot of the Lightroom work panel showing the position of exposure, contrast, and saturation control sliders into order to show how I successfully corrected the photo.

This is the unadjusted camera JPG which shows the degree of overexposure.This is my first version of the restored image, a Lightroom produced scaled JPG created from the camera RAW file. Notice how I was able to extract highlight detail all but lost in the Camera JPG above.My refined restored version of the over exposed photo.Here’s the screen shot of my Lightroom work window. Notice the positions of the adjustment slider controls and histogram.

This is what some might call ‘Fixing it in Photoshop’, although I used Photoshop’s cousin, ‘Lightroom’, rather than the classic program.